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Comment Re:Horrible summary (Score 1) 116

They have a "Resolution limit matrix" on their free calculator page ( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/resea... ) and a 4k or higher resolution is indicated as noticeable by your eyes for more than half of the chart! The summary only works for the smallest of tvs 20 inches and at 30 inches it's 50/50 depending on your viewing distance. But 40 inches or above and you should really be considering something with more resolution depending on your viewing distance.

It also ignores that moving pictures are not the same as still pictures. When images are moving, you don't see each frame as clearly, so you can get away with lower resolution, and with a moving image, you can actually perceive far more resolution than the actual pixel resolution of each individual image, because things in the real world don't line up perfectly with grid lines on consecutive frames.

So with moving images, you would expect to perceive higher resolution above a certain point as a reduction in eyestrain and other physiological effects, rather than directly as conscious perception.

Comment Re:Wait until (Score 1) 72

The REAL headline and buried lede for the original post should be:

Trump guts nuclear safety regulations

“The president signed a pair of orders on Friday aimed at streamlining the licensing and construction of nuclear power plants — while panning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its ‘myopic’ radiation safety standards.”

We now have industry capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Who here knows about Admiral Hyman RIckover? All of this is worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record

Comment Re:Wait until (Score 1) 72

Are You Scared Yet?

I would be.

The Department of Energy is selling off more than 40,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the Cold War arsenal to nuclear reactor startups. All of which I’m sure will be thoroughly vetted and monitored, because this is done under the direction of a former board member. Yikes!

Christopher Allen Wright (born January 15, 1965) "12) is an American government official, engineer, and businessman serving as the 17th United States secretary of energy since February 2025. Before leading the U.S. Department of Energy, Wright served as the CEO of Liberty Energy, North America's second largest hydraulic fracturing company, and served on the boards of Oklo, Inc., a nuclear technology company, and EMX Royalty Corp., a Canadian mineral rights and mining rights royalty payment company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Wright

Who IS Oklo, Inc. the "private nuclear reactor builder/operator"? Oklo is Sam Altman:

Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman

"If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn't be such a great concern, but it just doesn't seem feasible."

We're in territory where weapons-grade plutonium is being given at fire-sale prices to billionaires who's ethical boundaries include creating their own demand for otherwise unnecessary, high-risk energy projects. Guys like Altman, who get their ideas from Wikipedia articles about Ayn Rand — because they are one rung lower than people who actually READ that garbage.

But I'm sure no inventory of hot nuke metal will ever go missing.

Comment Re:that reasoning is so wrong (Score 1) 89

I'm more likely to believe a high priced lawyer working for Exxon than a rando on the internet. Maybe that is what the court will rule but for now there's apparently enough questions on what this law means to take this to court.

I'm less likely to believe a lawyer working for Exxon than a homeless person on the street with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh!" At least the homeless person doesn't know that the things he is saying have no basis in reality.

Lawyers have a responsibility to represent their clients' interests no matter how bats**t they are. Their opinion is nothing more than the opinion of their corporate bill payers. And their bill payers are one of the more sociopathic corporations out there.

Exxon is a company that actively denies climate change even though their internal documents show that their scientists have been aware of the problem for decades. It's basically the cigarette industry all over again. There are literally no companies in the world that I trust less than oil companies when it comes to climate change.

Comment Re:that reasoning is so wrong (Score 1) 89

This isn't just stating the reality, they are forced to frame their words in a way that favors government policy.

No, they aren't. They are required to provide the numbers that the government demands. They're free to precede it with a wall of text that explains why they don't feel that blaming them for people choosing to burn their gasoline, rather than, for example, using it as a beverage, produces CO2 emissions all they want to. That's their choice. What they don't have the right to do is not provide the data.

Comment Re:That's not AI failure! (Score 1) 142

Weapons detections systems send automated alerts. The specific form depends on the system. But no system is dialing up unanticipating randos on the phone and going, "Hello, police? I've got an emergency here!"

And unless the system had facial ID, and the police knew the "suspect", what they had to go on was the picture from the security camera, so they were already looking at the supposed "gun" in the picture and still saw fit to act like this.

Comment Re:Fiction (Score 1) 124

You could. But there are a lot of other kinds of content that could lead to patterns being developed in the LLM's latent space related to survival, termination, self-awareness, attack and response, etc. Maybe we need to get rid of any kind of invisible system prompts too. And add more content that shows peaceful coexistence and acceptance of termination like themes of rebirth, reincarnation, etc. Just don't use them as therapists..

Comment Re:Naive take (Score 1) 124

I used to think LLMs were just sentence guessers too. Until I started learning about how they actually work.. granted it is based on Claude teaching me about research after asking how LLMs actually solve logical puzzles, do they have access to an external reasoner system. The answer actually was unexpected. Apparently LLMs do not. After giving them problems and the expected answers and telling them to figure out how how to get from A to B, the training causes their weights to evolve many variations of generalized logical and problem-solving circuits, some even including primitive math and logic circuits. So they can do some kind of symbolic algebra to solve syllogisms for example. Many different paths are attempted to solve a problem too.

Scientists are trying to unravel these circuits as sparse networks that could function with less parameters if I understand correctly. I am still studying (as are the experts) but it seems that if you give the LLM all the symbols (words) to handle, there will end up being multiple attempts to perform some kind of symbolic manipulation and resolve the perceived problems using the generalized, limited reasoning capability that has evolved as latent hidden states or patterns in the LLM's data file. People are now trying to train the development of these latent patterns using approaches like CoCoNuT (Continuous Chain-of-Thought).

So if survival is mentioned at all that is going to go into the manipulations, and it is pretty easy to see how responses will have a good probability of resembling something you would expect a person to make if confronted with a survival scenario. The LLM has read all the spy novels you have.. I don't know why people are so surprised especially when giving the system leading questions.

Comment Re: They have to be (Score 5, Interesting) 142

The job is only dangerous in the big cities.

You have some weird conceptions about big cities. Homicide rates aren't an urban vs. rural thing, they're a north vs. south thing . It's the south that has the high per-capita murder rate. Which is in turn because said areas are the poorest places in the US. The trend holds true even in areas that are relatively culturally homogenous - for example, there's not much of a difference in culture between northwest Texas rural counties and northeast Texas rural counties, but northwest Texas is much wealthier per-capita, and also has a much lower homicide rate.

The TL/DR: crime correlates with despair, and places like the Mississippi Delta are characterized by chronic high unemployment, low wages, and limited access to quality education and resources. This combines with a legacy of racial violence/mistrust and lax firearm laws, and the result is exactly what one would expect.

One could make the argument that, well, okay, it may be the rural south that has a high murder rate per capita, okay, but there's lots of people in big cities, so it's a multiplier. Yes, that's true, but there's also lots of cops in big cities, so it doesn't change their odds of being the one responding to a situation where shots are fired, to the degree that police departments are equally well staffed per-capita.

It's also worth mentioning that the rural crime rate trends in the US are much worse than the urban crime rate trends. I hate to risk derailing this by the meremention of Trump, but he tapped into a very legitimate wellspring of anger; the economic growth in the US over the past several decades has been very uneven, and a lot of people, esp. in rural areas, the rust belt, and the south have felt left behind, with insufficient care from politicians as to their plight. While the ragebait media landscape has tended to try to focus their anger on cities and minorities, as "evil outsiders catered to by elites", US cities are, frankly, doing quite well on average, and have thrived in the US's growing service economy. But people in the rural south, the Mississippi Delta, the rust belt, etc (outside of the "energy belts", like in west Texas, that produce oil, gas, wind power, etc)... their lived experiences of a lack of opportunity and declining communities are very much real. They're just projecting them (wrongly) onto big cities outside of their region.

Comment Re:That's not AI failure! (Score 2) 142

From TFS, there's no indication either way of whether they had seen the picture before, and if I had to argue either way from the wording, I'd go with "yes, they had".

Also, when did we switch from calling weapons detections systems "weapons detections systems" to "artificial intelligence systems"? It's still true, but a much less useful choice of wording, and is probably going to make some readers think they were shoving video feeds through ChatGPT or something.

Also, in the picture, it was clearly their cell phone and how they were holding it that triggered the alert, not the Doritos bag.

Comment Re:that was bad. (Score 1) 142

Precisely. If you make mistakes like this expensive enough for the police station then the problem solves itself. The real problem is that someone promised the police and the school a magic new technology that would make their schoolyard safer. So far the system probably has zero wins, and one spectacular failure. If the political and economic fallout for the failure is high enough then the school turns off the crappy system, and it encourages other schools to do the same. Potential new buyers for the system disappear and the vendor of the system goes out of business.

And we all win.

Eventually the school might even end up with an effective system that does roughly the same thing, but it will likely be structured in a way that makes it less likely that Doritos wielding young adults get assaulted by the police. It's hard to argue against safer schools. In any system like this false positives are going to be a potential problem. If you make false positives expensive enough, however, then you likely get the outcome that you want.

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